May 19, 2020

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Video Script

Hello and welcome to week one of CIS 527. This video is basically a weekly announcements video. I probably won’t do one each week, but it’s a good chance for me to describe a few things going on in the course and things that you may want to know as you get started. So first off, hopefully you’ve seen the introductory videos, but if not, my name is Russ Feldhausen. I’ll be your instructor for this semester. This slide has my contact information. Feel free to take a look at it and let me know. You can email me anytime although for things related to the class, I prefer that you contact me through through Piazza. That allows both myself and my GTA, BreAnn, to respond to those questions very quickly.

Also, you may have already met BreAnn. She is my graduate teaching assistant for this semester. Her email is shown here. Again, feel free to contact us via email, but for things class related, we really do prefer that you contact us via Piazza so that we both see the message very quickly.

So, this class has been taught for several semesters at this point, especially during the summer, but summer 2020, I’ve made a few changes. One of the biggest changes is I’m now going to be enforcing a deadline of one module due each week. This is probably a little controversial, but in years past, I would leave the class open to the point where you could do anything at any time. And what we really found is that students would wait until the last minute to try and complete everything in this course. And it wasn’t really good for students. And it wasn’t really good for me either. And so this semester, I’m going to enforce a deadline where every module is due on a particular deadline. If you submit it after the deadline, there will be a scaling late policy where you lose 10% per day that it is late.

That said, if you know you have conflicts during the semester, if you’re going to be unavailable for any reason, contact me at the beginning of the semester and let me know. Generally what I would say is you should plan on working ahead of when you’re going to be unavailable instead of making up stuff after that deadline. Basically, I’m able to work with you on deadlines, but I really want us to stand the pace of getting one module due each week.

The other big change that I’ve made is the final project now includes a prototype portion. Originally, the final project just required you to design and analyze something. I’ve decided this semester that I’d also like you to prototype part of your design, that doesn’t mean that you have to build the whole thing or that you have to make it completely ready for the real world. But I’d like you to show some modicum of ability to design and develop the thing that you’re proposing. So this might be a little interesting. We’ll kind of see how that goes. But make sure you review the final project information closely. Especially if you’re familiar with how this class has been taught in the past because it is a little different this semester.

Finally, the other thing I’m doing diiferent this summer is I’ve decided to add some interactive discussions to this class that will be worth 10% of your grade. We’ll talk a little bit more about those as we get started. But basically, what we’re going to do is we’re going to have some regular zoom scheduled times during weeks two through six of the class, where we will get together on zoom, and we will talk about a particular topic probably for an hour. So if you can make the live session, that would be fantastic. We’d love to have really good discussions, but if not, we will record that session. You can watch it afterward. And then you can use that video to actually post your response to the discussion on canvas. We’ll probably actually use Piazza for that. But what I really want to do is give you a chance to communicate with me and your peers and some other folks about different things going on in System Administration. We’re going to try and bring in some guest speakers. For example, I may reach out to Seth Galitzer, our Computer Science Sys Admin, just to get you used to talking to people that work in that field and maybe getting some information about what’s going on. So that’s something a little bit new. We’ll see how that works. That will hopefully couple really well with the other thing we’ll do, which is we’ll continue to do our tea time office hours every week. So you’ll see messages about that. But it’s basically an open tea time where I sit in zoom. A lot of the Sys Admins and faculty and staff join me and you as students are welcome to come in and hang out with us, chat about just about anything, what’s going on in the world, whatever. So we’d love to see you there. I have a slide for that. Whoops. I already talked about this, but feel free to check it out.

Beyond that, keep in touch, there’s lot of places that you can get in touch with me- discussions on Piazza, Tea Time, office hours. You can also schedule one-on-one office hours with me anytime. There’s a calendly ilnk that you can find. So feel free to take advantage of that if you need more one-on-one time with me. You can also contact BreAnn. She can schedule some time to meet with you one-on-one. And lastly, I’ll be available on the Computer Science Rocket.Chat, which is available at chat.cs ksu.edu. So feel free to check that out as well. Other than that, that’s all I’ve got for week one. Good luck this semester. Feel free to keep in touch if you have any questions and I’ll probably post a couple more of these announcements videos as we go forward. So good luck have a good day!

June 29, 2020

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week four announcements video. I’m really glad to be here once again, I am back in Kansas so I can finally do these videos from my home studio. First off some quick things hopefully by now you’re done with lab three, if not, you should be getting done with that pretty quickly. So if you haven’t yet scheduled a grading time with BreAnn or myself and we can get lab three taken care of. Also make sure you check out on Piazza we had some issues with SNMP and lab three. So if you’re struggling on the SNMP, part of lab three, there is some information on Piazza that will help you out with that. Also, don’t forget the week two discussion response, the first discussion that we had with Seth Galitzer, that is due today by midnight. All you have to do is answer the few questions I posted on Canvas and then upload your response to Canvas by midnight tonight. Then starting today at 4pm is the week three discussion where we have Adam and Kyle the two Beocat sysadmins coming to talk about how they work with a high performance computing infrastructure, such as Beocat, they always give really interesting talks, so I’m hoping everybody can make it. And then also, don’t forget, you should be starting on lab four. Generally lab four is regarded as one of the harder labs in this class, and it will be due next Monday.

So, some tips for lab four, you’re going to need either four or five virtual machines. Usually you need a Windows Server, a Windows 10 client an Ubuntu server that you can reuse from your lab three, and then you’ll also need at least one Ubuntu client. You can either do it with two different snapshots or what I’ve started doing is actually just making a second Ubuntu client for the Windows Active Directory on Ubuntu part it’s up to you and how much space and resources you have available. This is by far the most taxing lab in terms of size. Lab six, we will use four of these VMs again in lab six, so you will need to keep them around. Basically, in this lab, you end up doing three things, you set up a Windows Active Directory server, and then connecting a Windows 10 client to that, then you set up an Ubuntu LDAP server and connect an Ubuntu client to that. With Ubuntu 20, we added the need for TLS certificates. So you’ll learn how to make that connection much more secure. Thankfully, you can just follow the guide for that. And then we will add an Ubuntu client to the Windows Active Directory. And this process has actually gotten super simple. A lot of people are really happy with the new process on Ubuntu 20. So the Ubuntu LDAP got a little harder, the Windows AD got a little bit easier. So it all works out.

So one thing I really wanted to talk about is getting help. We had several students with lab three that contacted us for grading, and then told us they ran into issues with the lab and weren’t able to get it to complete. But nobody asked us any questions. And so I really want to stress to you, please, please feel free to get help anytime you get stuck. There’s absolutely no expectation from either BreAnn or myself that you will be able to complete this class without asking questions. That’s part of the point. However, I don’t give you all the answers in the lab instructions, because if I did that, then the class would be kind of pointless. So there’s this weird gray area where I expect you to figure some things out on your own. But I also expect you to run into issues and have questions. So don’t be afraid to ask us for help. This is literally what BreAnn and I are paid to do. It’s especially what BreAnn is paid to do. But it’s also what I’m here to do. So to get help Piazza is key post on Piazza early, post on Piazza often, ask us all those questions. Read the other posts that your fellow students have posted and respond with your own information if you have any input. I added a new extra credit assignment to the class, helping hands, so that if you are active on Piazza and you are answering questions from other students, you can get extra credit points for that. Also on Piazza so we do ask that if you don’t if you feel comfortable, we would prefer that you ask your post. We would prefer that you ask your question publicly, that way other students can see the troubles that you’re having and can help you out. I understand that sometimes that can be a little bit uncomfortable if you have… if you feel like you have a stupid question or something. And that’s okay. Imposter syndrome was totally a thing. But also, I’m an introvert. I hate asking questions. And so you’re also welcome to ask your question anonymously. And so your fellow students won’t see who you are,. Obviously, if you post some identifying details in your post that’s on you, but you can ask your question anonymously. Only BreAnn and I will know who you are. Or you can ask it privately, in which case BreAnn and I are the only ones that can see the post. Sometimes we have been known to take that private post and make a short tl;dr version of it and post that as an anonymous post so that we can at least get that answer out there for people. If you’re truly stuck and you can’t get help on Piazza, you can always schedule a one on one time with BreAnn or myself to get help. We generally prefer that if you can ask the question first on Piazza and then we will direct you to a one on one. But if you want to schedule a one on one, you’re more than welcome to do that; both BreAnn and I have Calendly links available that you can use anytime you’d like. And like I said, once again, emphasis on there is no expectation that you will be able to complete this class without getting help. That is totally fine. It is what we’re here to do. So feel free to ask us questions anytime you have to.

So a quick summary of some of the changes we made in this class over the past few weeks. Most of these have already been announcements in Piazza or in Canvas. But just to clarify: the late policy, we have updated the late policy so that it only counts on working days only. And a working day is anytime where we would normally be in class. So for example, this Friday, the Fourth of July holiday does not count. We do need to work a little bit with Canvas to make sure that that’s getting applied properly, but we will look into that. So if the lab is due on Friday and you turn it in sometime before Monday at 7pm you’ll only be one day late. So we will make sure that that gets applied. If you have have a question on grading or you feel like the late policy was applied in the wrong way on any of your assignments, please let us know, and we will look into that. The new Canvas gradebook with this late policy is new to us. And so we’re still figuring out some of the quirks and tricks to make it actually work. The second thing we discovered is, if you have a late policy that is applied such that you end up getting a zero on a lab, even if you submitted it, it wasn’t unlocking the next module in Canvas. We have fixed that by assigning a minimum grade of 2%, which means that each lab assignment the minimum grade, if you submit it, is one point, so at least you will get that point so that you can move on to the next lab. One thing that I didn’t have in my slides here, but I want to mention really quickly, if you are done with a lab assignment and you’d like to move on to the next lab assignment, you can always go to the source website for this class, which is cis527.russfeld.me. And that has all of the textbook content for this course including all of the lab assignments. The only thing that isn’t there is some of the Canvas specific stuff like the quizzes and the discussions. And so for example, if you’re done with lab three and you’re waiting to get graded, you can go ahead and start watching the videos for lab four on that website. Again, it’s cis527.russfeld.me. We talked about this already, we added an extra credit assignment for the helping hands. Also just to clarify the extra credit in the class. Usually when you do something, we record a point or two points. And then at the end of the semester, we will scale those appropriately sized; there is a cap of 5% in extra credit in this class, so feel free to keep active and then at the end of the semester, we will scale it to make it basically match the amount of extra credit work that you have done up to 5% of the final grade in this class. Also, finally, K-State has implemented a mandatory mask policy on campus. This should not affect us but because we are 100% online class but that statement has been added to the syllabus and just be aware If you are on campus for any reason, you are required to wear a mask, at least as long as this order is in effect. I really encourage you to do that; it’s important for you to stay safe and stay healthy. So please keep that in mind.

All right. Quick overview of the discussions - we had our first discussion last Monday was Seth Galitzer at 4pm on Zoom, I thought it was really fantastic. It was great to hear a lot of the stuff that Seth does and some of the background. So don’t forget live discussions are every Monday at 4pm via Zoom, you can find the Zoom link on the Canvas homepage. Attendance is highly recommended but not required. We would really like to see you there. I think it’s a great chance to interact with other students in the class with industry folks and get some questions answered from me and from BreAnn. If you’re not able to attend, the video will be posted on Canvas usually shortly after the session is done. So you can watch that video and then respond to the discussion prompt on Canvas. Usually I ask a few questions about something the participants shared with us or some of the discussion or some of the things that they told us about. So you should be able to answer those questions pretty easily by watching that video. This week, like I said, we have Adam and Kyle, who are the two Beocat system administrators. They’re going to talk all about how they work to set up a high performance computing infrastructure, how they monitor it, how they maintain it. It’s usually really cool. So I’m looking forward to that. So we’ll see you today at four o’clock for that. Next week. We’re inviting a few students from the K-State Cyber Defense Club to discuss their infrastructure for basically simulating all sorts of different scenarios. They use it for training for their cyber defense competitions. So it’s something really cool that you might not be aware of that we have at K-State. So we’re going to have Caleb Fleming and probably a couple others from the cybersecurity club. Come talk about that. I have also tentatively scheduled K-State’s CIO to come in one of the last two weeks of the class. I’m still working on scheduling with him, but I am super duper excited that I was able to get him, at least tentatively confirmed to come talk to this class. It’s always one of the great speakers to try and get in is K-State’s CIO so that you can get kind of a top down view of what’s going on at K-State. If you don’t know our current CIO actually started about a week before the Hale Library fire and so he quite literally had a trial by fire his first couple weeks here. So hopefully he can tell us some stories about that.

So a quick overview of the schedule. Don’t forget the week two discussion is today at 4pm. The week one discussion response, if you weren’t able to attend and participate in person, is due tonight by midnight. This Thursday, BreAnn is unavailable, she’s got some other things going on. So if you try and schedule a meeting with her, her calendar will be completely blocked out on Thursday. I should still be available on Thursday so you can schedule with me. Friday, July 3rd is a student holiday because the Fourth of July is on a Saturday, so Friday, neither BreAnn or I will be effectively available. I will probably still be watching Piazza every once in a while over those couple of days, but I don’t make any guarantees that I will be quick. The week three discussion is next Monday at 4pm. Again, that’s the cybersecurity students. Lab four is due Monday by 7pm. So make sure you take that into account that both BreAnn and I will be unavailable from about 4pm till 5:30pm on Monday, so make sure you get your time scheduled. But the end of that discussion time might be a really good chance to talk to your fellow students and talk to BreAnn and I if you have any last minute questions on lab four. And then finally, the week two discussion response if you’re not able to attend today is due Monday, July 6 at midnight. So lots of things coming up.

Finally, a quick reminder, don’t forget this class does include a final project. Your final project is to do something system administration or it related. You can change something you can build something you can design a support infrastructure for something, you can do things like automation and DevOps. You can look at the infrastructure. You can look at different services that are available. There’s a full video online talking about different project ideas and the specifics of this project. You can work in teams on this final project. And in just a bit, probably before this video goes live, I will post a looking for group post on Piazza so you can collaborate with your teammates there and try and figure out if there’s somebody in the class that shares an interest with you and would like to work together. Don’t forget your proposal is due Friday, July 24. That is one week before the end of the semester. I encourage you to do it much before then. But that is the official last date that you can submit a proposal for full credit. And then the project itself is due then Friday, July 31. For the project, you will schedule a one on one time with me for a presentation, usually about 45 minutes between your presentation time and all the quick Q&A at the end. And so keep that in mind that last week of the class after lab seven is due we’ll spend most of that week doing final project presentations. Again, schedule your time early, so you can reserve the time you want. That way you don’t end up with this situation where you’re looking for a time, the day it’s due, and there’s no time left because they’re already booked. So keep the final project in mind. If you’re not sure what you want to do, and you want to talk with me about some possible project ideas, I’d be happy to do that I’ve got a few ideas that I can kind of pitch around and see if there’s something you’re interested in.

So finally, don’t forget to keep in touch, I am here to help, BreAnn is here to help. I really wish we could teach this class in person. The discussions that we used to have in the lecture of this class were some of the most fun I had teaching at K-State. But we can still do that - we have our Piazza discussion board, we have our Zoom weekly discussions. I’m on Tea Time office hours every Tuesday and Friday, although we won’t be on this Friday because of the holiday. BreAnn and I both host one on one office hours that you’re welcome to join. I’m also on the K-State Rocket.chat server. You can find me on K-State’s Microsoft Teams. Go to my website. I’m easy to find about anywhere. Please feel free to keep in touch, ask us questions, we’d love to hear from you.

And that’s it. So, good luck with the rest of the semester. Good luck on lab four. Like I said, lab four can be a little tricky. You need to make sure you follow the instructions really closely. The same advice applies for all the other labs, make snapshots often and don’t be afraid to roll back to a snapshot and try again, if something doesn’t work. There are lots of things that you can do that makes this go a lot simpler. So I wish you the best of luck. I will look forward to seeing most of you today at 4pm for a live discussion. And as always, if you have any questions, please post on Piazza

July 7, 2020

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Video Script

Good morning and welcome to the week five announcements video. I’m coming to you live and unscripted once again from my dining room just to cover a little bit about what’s going on this week in CIS 527. So first off, lab four, the due date was moved back one day, hopefully everybody saw that announcement last week. So it is now due tomorrow, which is Tuesday by 7pm. So hopefully either today or tomorrow, you’re ready to schedule a grading time with either BreAnn or myself. The week three response is still due today by 11:59pm. So make sure you get that in. Our week for discussion is also today at 4pm. We’re going to have some students from the Cyber Defense Club at K-State talking about their infrastructure that they use for training and getting ready for their cyber defense competitions. And then also be aware that lab five and lab six, we have grouped them together and both of them are due one week from Friday. That should be Friday. I believe it’s the 17th of July.

So, coming up next, we’ve got lab four that’s due tomorrow. We talked about this last week, there are four or five VMs. The one thing that we have updated, there was some confusion about NETBIOS domain names. So check the Piazza post on that; there’s a pretty lengthy post Piazza post going into some of those discussions. I’ve worked with a couple of students that have had some issues on lab four, but we seem to be able to resolve them pretty quickly. So hopefully, things are going well on lab four. But if you’re having trouble, please talk to us and let us know if you have any questions.

For lab five, you’re going to be creating actual cloud resources using DigitalOcean. So you’ll do things like configure SSH, set up a domain name, set up TLS certificates, virtual hosts, load balancers, everything that you need to run a real live website out on the web.

Because of that, we’re going to be using some cloud resources that you may or may not have used before. If you haven’t already, you should sign up for the GitHub developer pack at the URL at the top of this slide. It’s a really great way to get lots of discounts online. Overall, in this lab, we’re going to use DigitalOcean. So we’ll need two DigitalOcean droplets that run about $5 a month. We’ll also use a load balancer just for lab five, the load balancer itself runs $10 a month, but you’ll use it for a day. So your your total cost should be less than $1. We’ll also use a domain from NameCheap which you can go to nc.me and get a free domain for the first year if you’re a student. For DigitalOcean. If you don’t already have a DigitalOcean account either through the education.github.com you can get a DigitalOcean account or if you go directly to DigitalOcean, right now they’re having a deal where you can get $100 free credit if you sign up a new account there. So basically either way you should be able to get this done for free. But if you have used DigitalOcean before and you have used your NameCheap free domain before, at most, your total cost should be about $15 or less to yourself.

That said if you are uncomfortable using cloud resources, or don’t have the ability to do this, please let me know so that we can make alternative arrangements. In years past, I’ve worked with students to do these either directly on their VMs, or use some of the cloud resources that I use, just so that your cost and your trouble is a little bit easier. But if you can, I highly recommend going ahead and doing this lab as it’s written, it’s a really great way to experience working with cloud resources and real domains and real TLS certificates. And so I really recommend doing it the way that I’ve got it configured.

After lab five, then you’ll start working on lab six. Lab six mostly deals with file servers and application servers and some of the things around those. Specifically for the cloud, you’ll set up both a front end and a back end system. So you’ll have your front end with your web interface your back end with your database. And with the file servers, we’ll actually learn how to automatically map those resources to our different virtual machines.

Lastly, if you have any questions, don’t forget, please keep in touch in this class; you can join the discussion on Piazza; you can join our weekly zoom discussions. We have tea time office hours twice a week, you can find that also on Piazza. I do one on one office hours, BreAnn does one on one office hours. And I’m also available on the CS Rocket.chat server, which is chat.cs ksu.edu. Basically, if you have any questions, concerns, comments in this class, the number one thing you can do is reach out and ask for help.

I always get really sad when I see students that fall behind in this class and I reach out to them. And they just… they haven’t come to me and asked for help. And so I always want to remind you that it isn’t online class. As much as I really want to be able to help you, it really depends on you as a student to reach out to me and let me know what I can help with. Otherwise, I just don’t know where my resources are best spent. So if you have questions or concerns, reach out to me anytime, let me know and I’d be happy to work with you to get those things resolved.

Other than that, good luck on lab four. Hopefully you’re getting it finished up today. Good luck on labs five and six, which are due in two weeks. If you have any questions on either of those, let me know and hopefully I will see a lot of you today at four o’clock. So have a good day.

July 13, 2020

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Video Script

Happy Monday morning I’m coming to you once again live and unscripted for our week six announcements video in CIS 527. I apologize for my Coronavirus hair. I haven’t gotten a haircut since March. So it’s definitely been interesting doing some of these videos and watching me change over the semester. I hope everybody’s doing well with the pandemic. I know it’s really tough right now. I’m living in Kansas City, and it’s really crazy right here. So I hope everybody’s staying safe and staying healthy.

Okay, so where we’re at - lab four was due last Friday. I think last time I checked about half the class had that turned in. So if you don’t have lab four graded, go ahead and schedule a time with either BreAnn or myself very soon so we can get that taken care of. Don’t forget the discussion response from the week four discussion with the CDC infrastructure folks is due today. So make sure you get that uploaded by 11:59 tonight. This week’s discussion actually had to be moved to tomorrow because of a scheduling conflict with our guest. So today at 4pm, I’ll be doing a quick live office hours from four to five. You can use the same link that we use for the discussion room to join those office hours. Feel free to come in, hang out as questions, discuss stuff, share ideas. I’m just going to be there hanging out and hopefully having a good time. So please feel free to join me today at 4pm.

So our week five discussion is actually tomorrow at 4pm. I hope folks can join. We actually have an industry person coming and joining us, Ethan from Cerner. He works in their, I believe it’s called Cerner Works. It may have changed his name recently. But they do a lot of system administration stuff for Cerner, which is a large company. And then we also have lab five and lab six, which are both due this Friday.

So some lab five tips. Basically, you’re going to be building virtual machines in the cloud. So if you haven’t yet, you’ll need to sign up for a DigitalOcean account. When you sign up for a new account, you should get $100 in free credit. If not talk to one of us. We have referral links that we can get you One of the trickiest things about lab five is setting up your SSH keys. The thing to keep in mind is you create the SSH key on the source that you’re logging in from, and then you copy that key to the destination. On Windows, I really don’t recommend using PuTTY anymore. You can get SSH installed via the Windows subsystem for Linux or in PowerShell. Or you can use any of your Ubuntu VMs from earlier labs. But I really recommend avoiding PuTTY at this point, it just… it isn’t as good as it should be. On your host, you’ll also need to configure your firewall and then you’ll set up some virtual hosts and certificates using Apache and certbot. Generally, lab five doesn’t take too long. It’s just a lot of reading and getting through the material the first time but the actual lab content shouldn’t take all that long to get completed.

Then on lab six, you’re going to do three big things. In your droplets on DigitalOcean you’ll create a front end and back end server using WordPress usually, I highly recommend installing WordPress from the zip file. There are tons and tons of ways you Install WordPress. But by far the easiest is downloading the zip file, extracting it on your frontend, configuring the database section of it to point to your back end, and then you should be good to go. You’ll also set up a file server in Windows and some group policy in Windows to automatically map those file shares on your Windows clients. And then you’ll also set up a file server in Samba - generally just editing the Samba config file is enough. And then you’ll add a couple of automounts on your Ubuntu clients so that it mounts those Samba files automatically for you.

Also, please keep in mind the final project - your proposal for the final project is due a week from Friday on the 24th. So you need to start thinking about that soon. Remember, the idea for the final project is to build something or fix something that is vaguely IT related. It doesn’t have to be completely IT. Some things you could think of, for example, you could build out a web resource for a new startup company. The Animoto case study that we look at in lab five is a really great way to think about that. You could think about setting up laptops for a school. What if K-State orders 100 new laptops? How would you use tools like Ansible or Puppet to automatically provision and set up those laptops. If you work for a small company, you could look at how you would design central authentication for that company. So all the computers use either Microsoft Active Directory or OpenLDAP. And the resource sharing you can get with that, maybe even looking at VPN software, so you could connect to that network from remotely. More related to K-State. Think about the computer labs we have in 1114 and 1116. We have an example of a thin client lab that uses remote desktop to connect to big beefy Remote Desktop servers, or thick client labs like 1116, where each lab computer is its own fully powerful desktop. And so you could look at some of the cost benefit analysis of that. I’m sure Seth would be more than willing to talk to you about that as well. And so finally, on the final project, if you don’t have any good ideas, feel free to talk to either BreAnn or I - we’ve got some ideas we can share. We can kind of chew on things back and forth and see what’s interesting to you and how we can fit that into something that makes a final project. So the best thing I can say is don’t make this harder than it is we want to find something that is interesting and exciting to you and something that you would be excited to work on and try and build into a final project.

Other than that, here’s my usual slide. Don’t be afraid to keep in touch. There’s great discussions happening on Piazza. We have discussions on Zoom. We have our tea time office hours every Tuesday at 330 on Friday at 1030. We’d love to see you there. BreAnn and I both hold one on one office hours via zoom, all you have to do is schedule on our Calendly links. And then I also live on the Rocket.chat server. We may also set up a team’s server just to try that out for the last couple weeks of the semester.

But other than that, we’re getting close to the end of the semester, we only have three weeks left. So now’s the time to start making sure you’re getting everything taken care of as we get toward the end of the semester. If you have any questions, let us know. Otherwise, I wish you the best of luck and we will keep in touch.

July 20, 2020

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• Slides

Video Script

Good morning everyone and welcome to our week seven announcements video. I’m coming to you live and unscripted here from kind of a rainy Kansas City this morning. So let’s get right to it. First off, here’s where we’re at. Last Friday, lab five and six were due. So if you haven’t turned in and gotten graded for lab five and lab six, you should be doing so really quickly. Last I checked, I think we had maybe half the class done with lab five and a few people were through lab six. So hopefully we get that caught up very soon. Also, don’t forget the discussion response for week five, Ethan at Cerner, is due tomorrow. I apologize. I forgot to get the questions uploaded last week, but I uploaded them this morning. So that is available for you. So don’t forget to finish that discussion response by tomorrow. Today we have a special guest for our discussion. We have Dr. Gary Pratt. He is K-State’s CIO who’s going to be joining us and hopefully he’ll tell us a lot about K-State IT, the infrastructure we have at K-State, the future of IT at K-State, and kind of his top down perspective on how things are going. So I’m hoping that’s going to be a really good discussion. I hope you can join us. Lab seven. The last lab in this class is due this Friday, and we’ll discuss lab seven here in a bit. Also, don’t forget your proposals for the final project are due this Friday. So be thinking about your final projects if you haven’t done that. And lastly, a quick reminder, please make sure you check Calendly for our availability, both BreAnn and myself. BreAnn is starting a job next Monday and so her availability goes way down after this week. And actually toward the end of this week, it may be a little short. So please take a look at the calendly links for both BreAnn and I make sure you’re aware of our availability. And most most of the time I will be available, BreAnn will be available for parts of this week, but then starting next week will be much less available. So just be aware of that.

So coming up next is lab seven. Some quick tips for lab seven. Each part of that lab is self contained. So you can jump back and forth between the parts and they really shouldn’t impact anything that you’re doing. The task one, the windows backups task does take time. Depending on the specs of your machine, it can take a couple hours to do a Windows backup. So make sure you’re aware of that. Also, there’s some good information in that lab for either adding a second hard disk to your VMs for task one, or you can add flash drive or something to your machine and use that for your backups. Either one of those work. Task four is building an ELK stack, that’s something I added new this year. To do that, you’re going to have to give one of your Ubuntu VMs four gigabytes of RAM in order to handle the ELK stack. If that doesn’t work, let us know. It’s something I’m trying this year. So if students have a lot of trouble with that task, we may change it. For task five, the webhooks part, make sure you read the hook examples link that’s below that.

And finally for lab seven, we’ve modified it a bit so we can do on offline grading. So to get graded for lab seven, you can still contact either BreAnn or I through Calendly and we’ll grade stuff live for you in person. However, if you’d like to get graded offline, here are the things you need to submit for each task. For task one, we need four or five screenshots that are described in the assignment. For task two, you’ll submit a zip file of your backup and a readme that describes how your backup is built. For task three, you’ll send us the URL of either your Munin or your Ganglia instance. And bear in mind, those instances should so show data from both frontend and backend. For task four, we just want you to install the ELK stack and get us a screenshot of Metricbeat showing data from your VMs. And then finally, for task five, you’ll need to add us to your GitLab repo on the K-State CS GitLab server, and then send us the URL for where that repo is on your frontend or backend, probably front end, so that we can see the changes that we make to that repo.

So some quick notes about the final project. You’ve seen this slide a couple of times, already. So basically the idea of a final project is to build something or fix something IT related. There’s a few different ideas here, setting up web resources for a startup, building laptops for school, central authentication, thin clients vs. thick clients. There’s tons of ideas, maybe even today during the live discussion, you might get some ideas from Gary Pratt. So please be thinking about ideas. If you’re not sure you can schedule a Calendly time to chat with either BreAnn and I, we have some really good ideas just kind of stored up that students have mentioned over the years that we can share with you as possible good ideas for a final project. But bear in mind your proposal is due Friday. The proposal is super short. It’s usually half a page or less, its just enough description so that we can understand what your project is so that we can approve it so you can work on it next week.

So the final project presentation is coming up. You should schedule that for sometime next week, the last week of class, I highly recommend reserving your time now. There are 20 people in this class. Which means that if each person needs a half hour, that’s going to take 10 hours out of my time, which means that immediately not everybody is going to fit on Friday. It will be some Thursday some Friday. So schedule your time now - go to my calendar for Thursday or Friday of next week and grab your time. You should schedule 30 minutes per team member so if you’re on a team have to you’ll schedule an hour. If you need alternative arrangements, if you work during the days and you need to present in the evenings or something, contact me as soon as possible so we can make alternative arrangements. I’m trying the best I can to keep my calendar somewhat free for those two days. But there are always things that come up at the last minute so if you can schedule your times now I know that I can work around those.

A couple other quick administrivia things - tevals will be sent out next week. You should get an email from the teval system next Monday encouraging you to fill that out. Please take the time to fill out the teval and respond honestly with your thoughts and your feedback on this class. As you hopefully are aware all comments and feedback are welcome. I do change this class from time to time. And BreAnn and I have been having really good discussions about the implementation of deadlines in this class and some of the changes we want to make going forward into next summer that I think are going to make this class even better, but we really welcome your comments and feedback. You can comment on the teval, which is anonymous. You’re also welcome to contact me directly. If you want to chat with me and share some ideas that you have directly with me. I totally welcome that. And lastly, keep an eye on your grades.

For final grades, you should check Canvas anytime right now and look at the gradebook. As far as I know the grades you see in Canvas are correct. If you have any questions or concerns about those let me know as soon as possible so I can address that. It’s much much easier to fix grading problems now than it is Friday or the Monday after the end of the semester when I’m trying to submit grades to KSIS. So please make sure you’re checking your grades and let me know if there are any discrepancies you see as soon as possible.

Other than that, the usual keep in touch slide. We have great discussions going on Piazza. We have good Zoom discussions; I meet with students, it seems like almost every day now, which is fantastic. Don’t forget, we have our tea time office hours, which are Tuesdays at 330 and Fridays at 1030. It’s a great way to just get together and hang out with fellow computer science students and some of our faculty. We really do have a lot of fun during those times. I hope you join us. You can still schedule one on one office hours, I’m still on Rocket.chat. And we have our live discussion today at four o’clock with Gary Pratt. So tons of ways that you can get in touch with us in this class.

Other than that, we are almost there - we’re at the end of the semester. So we’re getting things wrapped up pretty quickly, hopefully get through labs five, six and seven very easily. If you do have questions or concerns, let me know. And then I look forward to seeing your final projects. The final projects in this class are always very interesting and I find it really exciting to see what students are thinking about. So good luck this week, and I will look forward to hearing from you soon.

July 27, 2020

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Good morning and welcome to the last weekly announcements video for CIS 527 for summer 2020. I’m really excited to see the end of the semester and I hope you are too. Here’s a few quick things to keep in mind for this week. First off lab seven was due last Friday. So if you haven’t completed and turned in lab seven, make sure you do that ASAP. If you look on Piazza, there’s information about how to turn in lab seven completely offline so you don’t have to get any live grading done. But if you’re having trouble with it, you can always schedule a live grading time especially if you want us to look at what you’re doing and see if we can give you at least partial credit for it. So please make sure you do that. If you’ve already turned in lab seven, BreAnn went through and graded almost all of it this weekend. So hopefully you should see some notes on Canvas very shortly. If you haven’t heard back from her yet, you should be very soon. If you have gotten an email from her especially about task five on GitLab, please make sure you respond to that ASAP so that we can get the permissions we need so we can test task five of lab seven on GitLab. Also, don’t forget the final project proposal was due Friday, I believe I got a final project proposal from most everybody in the class. So that’s really great. I posted comments and feedback on those so you can check that out on Canvas anytime. Also, don’t forget the week six discussion response for Gary Pratt K-State CIO is due today. So you can go out to Canvas and find the discussion prompt for that. And also, final project presentations are coming up this week. So if you haven’t scheduled your time for your final project presentation, please do so now. My Friday afternoon is already almost completely booked up. So make sure you’re looking at my calendar and planning ahead accordingly. Just because you get it done on Friday doesn’t mean you may have time to present it if you haven’t scheduled a time, so don’t forget to do that. I generally prefer presentations on Thursday and Friday of this week. But if you think you’ll get done sooner you can schedule earlier than that. So check our Calendly availability and see when we’re available. Also, please bear in mind that BreAnn doesn’t have any official availability right; now she started her full time job this week. But she will be doing some stuff in the weekends and generally following up with this class when she has time. So mostly if you need Calendly availability, it will be on my calendar for the rest of this week.

So for the final projects, you should be working on that this week, you’ll need to turn in three different parts of the final project to get a full grade for it. The first part is the written report. In the assignment, I give you a template that you should start with, that’s a good place to start, although you can adjust it a little bit to fit your needs. The big part of the written report is going to be showing me your research describing the system that you’re proposing and then detailing the SWOT analysis as you perform. Generally, I’ve seen the research take a couple pages, the proposal take a couple of pages, and then maybe each item of the SWOT analysis take at least a page, but there is no minimum or maximum limit. It’s however much content you think you need to get your point across. Your written report can include graphics and data as needed, feel free to make it as easy to read as you want. The second part is the live presentation, which will be about 15 to 30 minutes, per person. If you’re on a team of two, it will be twice that long. So schedule about a 30 minute block with me. And that’s when we’ll do your presentation. The big thing about your presentation is: I am your CIO for whatever organization this is situated in. And so you need to convince me that you have done your homework and that you’ve analyzed it well by going through your proposal and your SWOT analysis, and convince me that this is something our company should do. So that’s really the basis of your presentation. And then finally, you should build some small prototype that you can demo during the presentation. The prototype should be very small, the focus is on small here. So generally, I think you should spend about two to four hours building your prototype; anything more than that and it’s probably too much. For example, if your presentation revolves around AWS, your prototype might be building a system very quickly in AWS and installing a web browser on it, or a web server on it. That might be all you need as a small prototype to show that you’ve taken steps in the direction of your presentation just a little bit.

Some other things going on this week - Tevals, I believe everybody in this class should have gotten an email inviting them to complete a Teval this morning. Please take the time to fill out this Teval and send us your honest feedback about this course. Remember, the Tevals are completely anonymous to me, and I don’t even get to read them until after final grades are submitted. So you can say anything that you feel like you want to in there, and I really appreciate that feedback. It’s something that helps us constantly improve this course. And it helps me constantly improve and refine my teaching styles. So if you have any comments, for good or for bad, please put them in the Teval and make sure you get that submitted this week. Lastly, we’re getting toward the end of the semester. So make sure you’re checking Canvas and looking very closely at your grades. If you see anything in there that is incorrect, please email me and let me know ASAP. So I can get that taken care of. There is always a chance that something gets entered incorrectly in the gradebook. And it’s easier to solve that now, then after final grades have been submitted. So if you see any concerns in your gradebook, let me know as soon as possible.

Other than that, as always, feel free to keep in touch. We have great discussions going on Piazza, we have good Zoom discussions, we have our regular tea time office hours, which remember are every Tuesday at 330 and every Friday at 1030. So you’re more than welcome to join those even after this class ends. We’re going to keep tea time office hours going throughout the semesters, so feel free to join in. You can also schedule a one on one office hours with me anytime, even outside of this class, it’s always on my website, it’s always on my email signature. And I will be on the K-State CS Rocket.chat for the foreseeable future. We’ll also probably be implementing Teams at some point. So basically, feel free to keep in touch with me any way that you’d like. I’d love to hear from students in this class. I would love to see where you end up. I like to see how students in this class go in industry and are able to use some of the skills that we cover in this class in industry, it’s really great for me to see that.

Other than that it’s final project season. So it’s time to sit down and do some writing. I was inspired here by Alexander Hamilton to post this gif on the last weekly announcements video. Hopefully working on the final project is enjoyable for you. Hopefully, you’re able to get it done soon this week. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me and let me know. Otherwise, it’s been an honor having you in my class and I look forward to seeing all of you in the future. Have a good day.